“I needed to think of something else. I needed to think of nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing! I’m not nothing!”
“That’s not what I mean. You know what I mean. We were—I was obliterated. I needed,” he said, growling again, a different growl altogether from the ones he’d made in the motel, its rooms designed for hunters, not for the wild animals themselves, not for the wolves they’d been in those hours, ouroboros of this same obliteration he shouted about now, “I don’t know, further obliteration.”
She wanted to obliterate him still further for saying as much, for making her feel so used, and worse, for making her feel as though she had used him, taken advantage of his state, though she allowed that she had.
“But it wasn’t nothing. It was something, something real. I don’t mean—let me be clear. I don’t mean I want it to happen again. But I am not sorry that it did. That we did.”
She felt this way still. But if guilt would come for her anywhere, it would be here in their home. She was relieved to find that Adam’s face confirmed her belief that what they had done was a service, defanged the desire that had for so long existed between them, so that when she embraced him now and said, “Welcome home,” she felt no pull to be nearer his body, no wish to stay longer in the warm scent of his skin.
He thanked her for coming, and she felt from his hug that he was genuine, but could see from his expression that he was worried. She wondered if, when he saw her, he pictured the indecent things they had done, which to her felt already like they had happened in another life, to another woman. The other woman.
Margaret watched Ji Sun and Adam embrace. She lifted her hand, palm up, as though she might shove them together to the ground. She wasn’t sure what they had done during those nights in the motel, while Elizabeth slept on her chest, while she woke to warm her bottles, to shush her back to sleep, but she knew they had been up late, drinking, talking, and laughing, trying to comfort one another. Maybe they had kissed, but that wasn’t the intimacy she envied. Margaret had wanted to come all together less for not wanting to come alone, and more from her wish for any opportunity for the four of them to be together that wasn’t a formal gathering or an emergency. She longed for a kind of everyday togetherness, to sit close beside the others without any thought to when they would have to go. There was a way in which, when they were all together and the twins were at home, she could call up in her body what it had felt like to live with them, what it felt like to still be forming, free from their own parents, and not yet mothers themselves. It wasn’t nostalgia, but a kind of conjuring, and when it worked she could blur her eyes and make Lainey’s couch the window seat, imagine that the window behind it looked not out onto a city street, but hovered above the grass and trees of an empty courtyard, everyone else in the world asleep.
Alice had most feared coming alone. She didn’t want to open the door to Lainey’s apartment again and flash back to that day, only two weeks earlier, when she had raced over and found them all inconsolable, blood on their hands and necks, blood on Elizabeth’s cheek, bloody washcloth in Adam’s hand.
She had arrived then to find the scene both worse and not as bad as she imagined. The way Adam had sounded on the phone, it was as though the baby’s head was hanging on by a thread. She felt relief to recognize Elizabeth, to see that she was harmed but okay, but after that relief was revulsion in a rush that she could not release until she’d left their apartment, let herself feel the anger and disgust and fear and sadness that she could not when she was there, providing care. She’d felt that coming with Margaret and Ji Sun might guard against all of this coming back for her, and she’d been bolstered when Margaret arrived outside with a bouquet of yellow ranunculus, for which she’d already found a vase in the kitchen, where they all crowded together now.
“It’s healing nicely,” Alice said, and Margaret clapped like this was a party to celebrate an infection-free face bite, rather than whatever it was, which Alice supposed she did not quite know. They were all in the kitchen together, having all seen Elizabeth’s face by now, and wanting to be there, to know what they could hope for, how to move forward.
“What are you going to tell her? When she’s older?” Alice asked, lifting Elizabeth from the countertop changing pad where she’d examined her, and passing her back to Lainey, who bounced her and cooed at her, quieting the cries she’d made when Alice hovered over her with her penlight.
The stunned look on Adam’s face told Alice that they hadn’t talked about it, maybe hadn’t even thought about it.
“That a dog bit her,” he said. “Of course. We can’t tell her that her mother, that her mother . . .” He trailed off, looked at Lainey, who had her own face tucked low, over Elizabeth’s, as though to protect the baby from hearing what they decided.
“Bit her face,” Alice said.
“Yes, Alice, we all know what happened,” Ji Sun said, looking back and forth between Alice and the baby.
“But she’ll need to know the truth,” Alice said. “Someday, I mean. Don’t you think?”
“Uh, no,” Adam said. “I don’t.”
“Doesn’t it seem wrong, though, for us to know this thing about her that she will never know? People have trauma,” Alice said, “when they don’t know the story of their own lives.”
“Not everyone has your damage, Alice!” Margaret said, an abrupt edge in her voice that caused Alice to turn and face her. “And besides, it’s not up to us.”
“Sometimes you just . . . you can’t have it in the house,” Adam said.
“But it’s here! Even if you pretend it isn’t, blame it on some dead dog. You’re going to live with it.” Alice was angry enough to cry. She knew that with enough time, even those who knew the truth would believe the lie. Even Kushi thought Alice’s scar came from an accident. Wouldn’t they tell their children the same? How many generations to make it true?
“Dog or truth,” Ji Sun said. “You’re going to live with it either way.”
“Dog or truth?” Alice looked at Ji Sun, aghast. “Truth! It’s not the same! Keeping that kind of secret, it can cause not just stress, but physical degradation in the body. There are studies about this.”
“Okay, Alice, calm down. What are you, a trauma psychiatrist now? Can you back off a bit?” Adam spoke in a tone that only Lainey and Ji Sun had ever heard, and which made Ji Sun consider how he might struggle to guard his own secrets.
“No one knows everything about anyone. Not even themselves. Maybe least of all themselves.” Lainey spoke now, looked up from Elizabeth’s head, which rested against her chest.
“What would you have them tell her? That her mother bit her?” Ji Sun asked Alice, wanting to take the heat off Adam.
Lainey would never say aloud how large a part of her wanted to answer yes to this, that this was the story she wanted her daughter to know, to tell. She could imagine how the scar would be almost imperceptible in the future, faint lines of shine, and only those people who looked at Elizabeth for a very long time, or held her face in their hands, would notice and wonder, or ask. And what, Elizabeth would tell some tale about a pit bull? This tormented Lainey to consider, that people would think Elizabeth had parents who left her unattended in a park or a yard, how they would not know, hearing this story, that Lainey had never been far enough from her daughter’s face during that part of her life for a dog to come anywhere near.
The story of how her mother bit her was truer to reality, of course, but also truer to what kind of mother Lainey was: consuming, voracious, insatiable, and in love. Deranged by love, she had told Adam, after the institution. I’m not depressed, but I am deranged.
Rearranged by love. Lainey had always been a fierce defender of the belief that people without children didn’t have some compromised experience of love, that to suggest a life was incomplete without a baby was yet another way to control women’s lives. No one knew what it felt lik
e to love anyone else, no matter who they loved, and she didn’t truck with these people who thought loving a child granted you entry into some true human club. You could know a love as rich and as deep without a child, maybe richer, maybe deeper, who could say? How deeply you drank from the well of human experience did not depend on any one person, even one you helped to create.
And then she had Elizabeth and realized most everything she’d said was utter garbage. She did know another love now, and it wasn’t a different speed in the same lane, it wasn’t a new key for the same song, it wasn’t a variant on anything she’d ever known. She hadn’t known a thing. It wasn’t any adjective she knew or could name, though she tried: encompassing, consuming, transcendent. Could love be transcendent when it knit her to the earth in a way she had never known she could be, when she felt herself so elemental but still otherworldly, like she both lived on and had become some new planet, and no one could visit but Elizabeth, who didn’t know enough language yet to speak about this place.
How could she have been the one to bring them back down to planet Earth? She was meant to shield her daughter from the muck and ugliness of this place for as long as possible, for as long as she lived, and that she had failed so spectacularly, already, only redoubled her dedication to not let further hurts touch her baby, to remake the world. Elizabeth’s future lovers should know that there was someone who loved her more than they could ever even imagine themselves capable of. They should know this and treat Elizabeth accordingly. If love and protection, even warped, had led Lainey to bite down into the soft flesh of her infant daughter’s face, they would know to fear her power. They would have been warned.
Chapter 51
They were not all together again, not truly, for nearly a year, a stretch during which they were so busy in their own lives that it was difficult to meet even in permutations other than the four. But Margaret made a plan for a reunion, saying if they didn’t establish it as a yearly tradition now, they never would. She arranged for everyone to come to the beach house that she and Mac rented in Montauk, and over a lengthy chain of emails they agreed on a long weekend in late spring to congregate at the end of the world.
They had all been gathered once in the interim, for a party celebrating Alice and Kushi’s adoption of a son, Tej. But there had been so many people in attendance that it was easy to get swept up in other conversations, and Margaret had been distracted chasing her twins, Lainey feeding Elizabeth blackberries, and Ji Sun busied in her role as godmother. Alice had asked her, though only nominally Lutheran, and in spite of the fact that she knew Ji Sun had turned down this same request when Margaret made it, after the twins were born. Margaret had thought of it as almost a gift to Ji Sun, who did not plan to have children of her own.
“But you know, I don’t want children,” Ji Sun had said, and wished that Margaret had asked her over the phone rather than inviting her to this “special lunch,” a designation that might have warned Ji Sun, but which she’d brushed off as special for other reasons, since the two of them almost never met alone, and hadn’t once since the twins were born. “In the event that . . . that the unthinkable happens, I still don’t want to raise any children.” Ji Sun busied herself with her silverware.
“I hadn’t really thought of it like that,” Margaret said. “Of course that is what I’m asking. But I suppose I was just thinking how you’d stand up at the baptism, be the special auntie.”
“I’ll be a special auntie anyway. Their imo, their only one,” Ji Sun said, feeling guilty as she always did when called to defend her lack of desire for children, even to her friends. She was always quick to say that though she didn’t want her own, she loved children. This was not true. She didn’t love children, not all children, not as a group. She loved a few, specific children: her nieces, her nephew, and now, her would-have-been godchildren, Margaret’s newborn sons. But she didn’t wish to live with any of them.
“And I could, God forbid, if anything happened to you and Mac, I could help financially, whoever does raise the boys,” Ji Sun said, still feeling guilty. It was harder, somehow, to say no to such an enormous favor, than to a minor one. Major mistakes were made simply by being caught off guard, unprepared to decline with grace.
“Oh, no, that’s not, that isn’t a consideration,” Margaret said, though Ji Sun’s wealth had in fact held appeal to Mac when Margaret told him that she wanted to name Ji Sun godmother.
At the party for Tej, Ji Sun had hoped somehow not to acknowledge this awkwardness, but Margaret had broached it off the bat.
“Oh, hello, godmama,” Margaret said, and knocked her hip against Ji Sun’s. Margaret smelled of cut flower stems and lemon rind.
“It’s just the one,” Ji Sun said, and blushed. “Maybe I could manage it. Before I ship him off to boarding school.”
“Not to worry,” Margaret said. “Alice is indestructible. She’ll probably live to be a hundred and four.”
Ji Sun bristled at this fast-forward, pained already by how quickly the years had begun to go, how they’d accelerated for her, even without the physical yardsticks for measuring time that now lived in her friends’ homes, their children.
“And Howie, too,” Ji Sun said. “We’re a package deal this time.”
“Even unmarried!” Margaret said, adding, “Sorry, you know what I mean.”
“Even unmarried. I know what you mean.”
Kushi and Alice’s son was black, and Alice had, after an adoption counseling exercise using dried beans to represent her and Kushi’s closest friends’ ethnic backgrounds, told Ji Sun that she hoped to enlist Howie, also black, as a role model, even if he wasn’t comfortable with the formality of being godfather.
Ji Sun had been a little reluctant to convey Alice’s request, embarrassed at its intimacy, and its racial contours, so frank that they felt crass. But Howie clapped when she asked him, and pulled her into one of the tight hugs he sometimes gave when he was surprised.
“Of course I will, are you kidding? I’m honored,” he said. “I love Alice. But she’s white as hell.”
Ji Sun had laughed then, and been grateful for his embrace of the title, how it meant that no matter what happened between them, they would remain connected in this way, godparents to a baby that they would never wish to raise, but loved without reservation before having ever glimpsed him.
Now, on the beach together, Howie was holding his godson while Kushi took a photograph. Mac was chasing his feral sons, and Adam trailed close behind Elizabeth, newly walking, as she navigated the sand with her own two feet for the first time. Lainey sat between Alice and Ji Sun, empty baby wrap loosed around her like an overlong scarf, her eyes on Elizabeth. Though it was sunny, the wind was brisk and they all wore long sleeves. The water was two months away from being inviting, but Margaret was in the ocean. She insisted that this kind of bracing off-season dip was the key to health and longevity, and they watched her now, shivering but somehow radiant even in the shadow of her hat. She was pregnant again, but in the water up to her breasts, so Alice didn’t have to consider her stomach.
Alice had told Kushi she was ready to adopt the same weekend that she’d stitched Elizabeth’s cheek. Biology was no guarantee. You could birth a baby, your own, and take a piece from her face. You could try to push your brother by blood to his death. Why, knowing this as she did, had she insisted there was some greater safety in a baby she and Kushi might make with their bodies? The best love she had given so far in her life was to women to whom she was not related, and to Kushi. The best love she had been given, too. She’d fled Lainey’s apartment that morning as though chased by the cresting wave of a tsunami, faster than she had ever run in her life. She knew Kushi was waiting for her, that he would help her bear the weight of what she carried home.
She’d collapsed on their couch and stayed there all weekend, tucked in a blanket and lulled by the smells of Kushi cooking his big batch of Sunday biryani; the hum of the
ir turned-low television; the reassuring weight of a book tented open at her ankles. She knew this place could be a shelter. She didn’t know yet the ways she would fail Tej, but she could feel, in the room with Kushi then, the comfort she and Kushi could offer, the safe harbor of the space between them on the couch, even if, against all that waited outside, it was only a scrim. When she told Kushi over dinner that she wanted to call their adoption counselor first thing the next morning, he cried, and she felt a relief unlike any she had felt before, save the once, that deliverance she would always return to, when she saw her brother come back from the dead. The relief of not having killed him, just before the terror of watching his eyes open, wondering what he might say when he saw her face. She lived there still, between the relief of not having killed him, and the terror of what he might one day show her that he knew. But Alice knew by now that most people lived in that same place, that everyone around her was just between escaping something and not knowing what might come for them next. All they could do was find those people whose hands they would hold fast when they ran.
Alice looked at Kushi now as he adjusted Tej’s tiny sun hat, lifted him from Howie’s arms into his own. When she, Kushi, and Tej were out together, people never failed to point out how alike Kushi and Tej looked, their matched black hair and bright brown eyes, Tej’s brown skin lighter than Kushi’s, but darker than Alice’s, even when she’d spent whole summers on a boat. She thought Tej and Kushi did share a kind of irrepressible adorability, a charisma that people responded to, and that Kushi teased her about saying a baby could have, even as he agreed that their baby did. But she also believed Tej looked objectively more like her, his jaw strong like hers, his gaze intense like hers, at times forbidding. Tej had a birthmark on his neck, below his jaw, on the opposite side and not quite aligned with where her scar fell, but near enough that Alice recognized it immediately as a connection, a matched mark they arrived to one another already bearing. A question others would ask of them. Answers that, if offered, would not satisfy. What they were born with, what the world wore away.
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